November 30, 2004: Headlines: COS - Cameroon: Writing - Cameroon: Evil: Waterbury Republican American: Cameroon RPCV Mary-Ann Tirone Smith writes books about evil. About evil people. Horrific events. About people who do the unspeakable and then have the temerity to speak about it.

The face appeared unbidden. It was just as it had been before the indignities. The brown eyes. The Loretta Young cheeks. The fleshy, trusting mouth. Like all apparitions, this one was as revelatory as it was shattering.

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith hadn't thought about her 11-year-old classmate, Irene Fiederowicz, a timid, tall girl found strangled to death in Smith's Charter Oak neighborhood in 1953, in decades. But, suddenly, as the East Haven author was working on a coming-of-age essay, her playmate's face flashed before her.

"I'm in the fifth grade when, in this idyllic little neighborhood, my classmate was snatched off the street, raped and strangled to death and they found her three yards from my house," she says. "I'd never resolved that here's this incredible crime that turned my life inside out and turned my neighborhood inside out. When you're 9 and realize that not only are you not safe, but someone could come and do something horrible to you, your life has changed."

Smith, a writer of mysteries and crime fiction who will speak at the Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury tomorrow night from 7 to 9 p.m., strokes her strong jaw. She looks out her abundant windows to the craggy, placid East Haven beach, as a fine mist settles over the seaweed-blackened rocks. Short and slender, with creamy brown eyes and a short, saffron page-boy haircut, she bears a striking resemblance to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She shakes her head. Irene Fiederowicz may not be the definitive answer to why she writes what she does, or the way she does. But it is, as her heroine, FBI Agent Poppy Rice would say, a clue. And a good one.

"Irene went missing," Smith recalls. "Her body was found the next day. People (at school) are saying something happened. Something is amiss. You can tell something is amiss because the teacher is out of position. Everything is totally somber. And she says, 'We will not speak of Irene.'" Smith pronounces each word slowly and emphatically. We. Will. Not. Speak. Of. Irene. "Then she got the janitor and we took Irene's desk out of the room and did not speak."

"So I rushed home. My mother worked -- I was the first latchkey kid in the country -- and I knew (the story) would be in the Hartford Times. And I read this big headline "Hartford Girl Strangled." I could hear my father's car flying into the driveway. He comes running into the house and I look at him and I say, 'What's rape?'

"My father ripped the newspaper from my hands and told me to go to my room."

And that, as they say, was the end of Irene.

But not of Mary-Ann Tirone Smith's curiosity.

Tirone Smith writes books about evil. About evil people. Horrific events. About people who do the unspeakable and then have the temerity to speak about it. Under duress, of course. Her last three novels have been mysteries featuring an intrepid, irreverent FBI Agent named Poppy Rice. Rice is everything Smith isn't: tall, lean, sharp-tongued, mildly Machiavellian. But Rice and Smith share an interest in the macabre, in the crazed, in understanding the irrational that masks itself benignly as normal.

Mary-Ann Tirone Smith grew up in what she herself would admit were ostensibly idyllic environs. Everything she needed -- the church, the school, the branch library, the 5 & 10, the drugstore, the little grocery store and the tavern -- was in one cozy, compact square mile. It should have been idyllic. It wasn't. Smith's brother was autistic, an idiot savant who was erroneously diagnosed as mentally retarded. Rainman, Smith says. He was Rainman. Obsessed with World War II ships and aircraft. Left a library of 2,000 books on the subject when he finally died in 1999 at 61. "I was truly raised in a looney bin and my salvation was the branch library," Smith says.

"In my house you couldn't laugh," says Smith, whose cozy, immaculate condominium reaches out over the rocks on East Haven's Town Beach. As an autistic, her brother, Tyler, had an aversion to noise. "You had to flush the toilet only when my brother was sleeping. We had to run out of the house if we needed to sneeze." No one in the family could wear red, a color that would set Tyler off into twitching, shrieking pantomimes. "I once taunted my brother. I said, 'What happens if I wear this red sweater?' And he said, 'If I see that color, a cloud of pins with little hooks on the end comes into my face and I can't get them out.'"

As a retreat, Smith had the library and a bookstore called Witkowers. It was run by a guy named Izzy Epstein, an indulgent, avuncular sort who later hosted Smith's first book party. "Every Saturday my father used to drop me off there and he'd go outside and see his bookie or whatever, and I'd stay in there with Mr. Epstein. I got it into my head that I was going to write a book."

Tirone-Smith has now written eight books, all of them with a tinge of crime, embellished with social issues. She's been on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. People Magazine designated two of her books, "An American Killing" and "Love Her Madly,"page-turners of the week. If not for the flash of insight that brought her playmate's memory back, she might have assumed that her books all came out of her social-justice Catholicism, her Democratic activism, her old Peace-Corps belief that all any of us need is a hand up and a push forward.

Or it might have come from her obsession to explain the inexplicable.

"I don't believe in the evil seed," says Smith, sitting in a rocking chair in her nautical-inspired library. "I think we're born good and there isn't any question that people who are sadistic are so often brain-damaged because of the abuse they took as children. This happens over and over. This heinous behavior you see people do... Some people have been bat in the heads so much."

Smith has lived all of her life in Connecticut, outside of the two years she spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon. There, she helped set up a library. When she returned to the U.S., she began working at the Stamford Library until she took a job as a kindergarten teacher in the Norwalk public schools for three years until her two children were born. As soon as her son was in nursery school, she began dropping him off at school and going to the library to write. She published her first book, "The Book of Phoebe," in 1985. Since then, she has released a slew of novels and essays, including her latest, "She Smiled Sweetly," the third in her Poppy Rice series. She's lived in East Haven for four years, after spending 30 in Ridgefield.

While she might be able to trace her own fascination with the pursuit of justice, she's less clear about the allure of the mystery and thriller genres.

"A lot of this replaces public hangings, which were highly attended," she says. "It probably is a fascination with death. I think people are fascinated with a murder. How could you not be fascinated?"

"If you understand something and are willing to face the truth, maybe there is something you can do. Maybe this can be fixed. A person who becomes evil can manipulate people into doing heinous things. I'm thinking of Columbine....Hate is satisfying to so many people. They seem to like being hateful and miserable."

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Story Source: Waterbury Republican American

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